The Zen of Programming. Jim Waldo via the Bright Eyed Mr Zen. [Quote] …. all require that the programmer change …. we need to give up a measure of control and accept that we cannot have full knowledge of the systems we are building …. we will know is a minimum set of behaviors …. over time the system will change in ways we could not have foreseen. Just as Socrates found that he was the wisest of men because he knew that he didn’t know anything (as opposed to others, who thought they knew something but were wrong), programmers must come to the realization that their knowledge of systems will be more and more Socratic. Rather than knowing everything, we will know what it is that we do not know …. the result will be more reliable, more flexible and more dynamic than the systems ….[Unquote]